Video games are inexorably tied to technology: as processors and, just as importantly, manufacturing processes advance and become cheaper, more becomes possible for the game designers.

Of course, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, and the leap from 2D games to 3D games created a wall that a lot of beloved franchises slammed into. In some cases, so hard that it killed the franchise. Here are the five worst cases, all of which are classics because, let’s face it, nobody gave a crap about Bubsy.

#5) Contra

It’s not that Contra’s 3D entries were at all bad: developed by Appaloosa, they were actually pretty good. They just weren’t really “Contra”, and Konami started pretending these had never happened fairly quickly.

#4) Bomberman

Dear Hudson:

Nobody buys “Bomberman” to try out the single player mode. Give us the multiplayer and have done with it.

Sincerely,

Every Gamer on Earth

#3) Final Fight

“Final Fight: Streetwise” and “Final Fight: Revenge” are disastrous for entirely separate reasons. The first because it tried to take what was a silly ’80s action movie of a video game and turn it into a profound, serious meditation on urban rot. Or maybe they were just trying to be “adult”. We’re still not sure. Either way it was stupid and hard to play.

“Revenge”, on the other hand, is a game developed for the Saturn, really only popular in Japan, by an American developer, and it looks like this: